Audio video content is typically broadcast with breaks filled by advertisements. The amount of live television that users are watching is decreasing in favour of recording content on a digital video recorder (DVR) for later viewing. When content is recorded, the advertisements that fill the breaks in the content are also recorded. However these advertisements can be more relevant at the time of the original broadcast than at the time of playback. This is especially true if the recorded content is played back some time after the original transmission of the content.
Advertisement substitution is a technique that uses business rules to target advertisements to individual subscriber homes in a pay TV network. Instead of all viewers receiving the same live channel advertisements, each subscriber is shown targeted advertisements. The targeting is based on a number of factors, often including the original broadcast channel, the genre of the content the substitution opportunity is contained within and the time of day advertisements can be shown.
Operators do not know what content has been recorded by a user and is being stored on disk for later viewing. Therefore, for advertisements in recorded content, advertisement substitution has typically been done using an intelligent agent within the user's DVR, which uses various criteria to determine what advertisement(s) should be substituted within an advertisement substitution opportunity.